The Gift of Bonds, or Essences

In Husserl’s first book, the Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891)—a series of logical and psychological investigations on the concept of number, which deploy the two principal sources of Husserl’s formation—he describes a particular phenomenon: figural moments. Chapter 11, § 7, entitled “The Figural Moments,” poses the classical problem of the one and the many, perhaps the most ancient problem in Western philosophy. Plato had already confronted this problem in a very intuitive way in his Theaetetus. Let us take two letters, say m and e, that give rise to the word me when arranged together. Does the combination of these two letters, Plato wonders, form a new object—a word—or is the word simply the sum of the two letters? Does the word, so to speak, simply reduce to the plurality of its given elements? For Plato, of course, the correct response is the first, because to form the word me the elements are not sufficient: contiguity and an order of succession are also necessary; thus, a certain form of unity.